The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Physics,
#11551
Gerta von Ubisch
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Gerta von Ubisch was a German physicist, geneticist, and botanist. She studied barley and found a genetic explanation for heterostyly. In 1933 she lost her position at Heidelberg University because of her Jewish heritage.
Go to Profile#11552
Harold Knox-Shaw
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Harold Knox-Shaw was an English astronomer. He was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex. He was the oldest of four siblings. During his youth he earned scholarships to Wellington College in Berkshire and to Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated in 1907 ranked as Sixth Wrangler. A year following his graduation he became an assistant at the Khedivial Astronomical Observatory in Helwan, Egypt. He was elected Fellow of the Society in 1908. In 1910 he became the first to photograph Halley's comet from this site.
Go to Profile#11553
Arthur W. Conway
1875 - 1950 (75 years)
Arthur William Conway FRS was a distinguished Irish mathematician and mathematical physicist who wrote one of the first books on relativity and co-edited two volumes of William Rowan Hamilton's collected works. He also served as President of University College Dublin between 1940 and 1947.
Go to Profile#11554
Vibert Douglas
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Allie Vibert Douglas, , who usually went by her middle name, was a Canadian astronomer and astrophysicist. Life Douglas was born in Montreal, Quebec, on 15 December 1894. Because both of Douglas' parents died the year she was born, she first lived in London, England with her brother George Vibert Douglas, and her grandmother. Douglas' grandfather was Rev. George Douglas, a prominent Methodist minister and educator. In 1904 both Douglas and her brother returned to Montreal where they attended Westmount High School. Growing up, Douglas was interested in science but felt that her gender was a handicap.
Go to Profile#11555
Jagadish Chandra Bose
1858 - 1937 (79 years)
Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was a polymath with interests in biology, physics, botany and writing science fiction. He was a pioneer in the investigation of radio microwave optics, made significant contributions to botany, and was a major force behind the expansion of experimental science on the Indian subcontinent. Bose is considered the father of Bengali science fiction. He invented the crescograph, a device for measuring the growth of plants. A crater on the Moon was named in his honour. He founded the Bose Institute, a premier research institute in India and also one of its oldest. Established in 1917, the institute was the first interdisciplinary research centre in Asia.
Go to Profile#11556
Pavel Cherenkov
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov was a Soviet physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1958 with Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation, made in 1934. Biography Cherenkov was born in 1904 to Alexey Cherenkov and Mariya Cherenkova in the small village of Novaya Chigla. This town is in present-day Voronezh Oblast, Russia.
Go to Profile#11557
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson
1869 - 1959 (90 years)
Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, was a Scottish physicist and meteorologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his invention of the cloud chamber. Education and early life Wilson was born in the parish of Glencorse, Midlothian to Annie Clark Harper and John Wilson, a sheep farmer. After his father died in 1873, he moved with his family to Manchester. With financial support from his step-brother he studied biology at Owens College, now the University of Manchester, with the intent of becoming a doctor. In 1887, he graduated from the College with a BSc. He won a scholarship to attend Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he became interested in physics and chemistry.
Go to Profile#11558
Alice Hall Farnsworth
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Alice Hall Farnsworth was an American astronomer. She was director of John Payson Williston Observatory at Mount Holyoke College from 1936 until her retirement in 1957. Early life Alice Hall Farnsworth was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, the youngest of four children of Frederick Tudor Farnsworth and Anna Caroline Tufts Farnsworth. As a child, she was an active reader of St. Nicholas magazine, submitting contest entries and winning prizes.
Go to Profile#11559
Tokubei Kuroda
1886 - 1987 (101 years)
Tokubei Kuroda was a Japanese scientist and academic. He is best known as a pioneering taxonomist and malacologist specializing in Japanese marine and terrestrial Mollusca. Early life Kuroda was born at Fukura on the island of Awaji. He graduated middle school at 15, and was recruited as a houseboy by Yoichiro Hirase, a Kyoto dealer in poultry, seeds and aviculture products who had founded a side business trading in marine and land shells. While his employment initially included cleaning Hirase's large house and looking after his children by day, Hirase paid for Kuroda to attend night school...
Go to Profile#11560
Marshal Henry Wrubel
1924 - 1968 (44 years)
Marshal Henry Wrubel was a child prodigy in music, an astrophysicist, and the first director of Indiana University's Research Computing Center. At age 11 Marshal Wrubel entered the Juilliard School to study piano. In 1944 he graduated from Juilliard and also graduated from CUNY with a B.A. in physics. After graduation, he served in the U. S. Army for two years and worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. After completing his military service Wrubel entered in 1946 the astrophysics doctoral program of the University of Chicago and received in 1949 his Ph.D. under Chandrasekhar. He spent...
Go to Profile#11561
Vladimir Sukachev
1880 - 1967 (87 years)
Vladimir Nikolayevich Sukachev was a Russian geobotanist, engineer, geographer, and corresponding member and full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His wife was Henrietta Ippolitovna Poplavskaja.
Go to Profile#11562
J. Hans D. Jensen
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, known as the Uranium Club, where he contributed to the separation of uranium isotopes. After the war, Jensen was a professor at the University of Heidelberg. He was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Institute for Advanced Study, University of California, Berkeley, Indiana University, and the California Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#11563
Willem de Sitter
1872 - 1934 (62 years)
Willem de Sitter was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. Life and work Born in Sneek, de Sitter studied mathematics at the University of Groningen and then joined the Groningen astronomical laboratory. He worked at the Cape Observatory in South Africa . Then, in 1908, de Sitter was appointed to the chair of astronomy at Leiden University. He was director of the Leiden Observatory from 1919 until his death.
Go to Profile#11564
Norman Hilberry
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Norman Hilberry was an American physicist, best known as the director of the Argonne National Laboratory from 1956 to 1961. In December 1942 he was the man who stood ready with an axe to cut the scram line during the start up of Chicago Pile-1, the world's first nuclear reactor to achieve criticality.
Go to Profile#11565
Bruno Thüring
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Bruno Jakob Thüring was a German physicist and astronomer. Thüring studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy at the University of Munich and received his doctorate in 1928, under Alexander Wilkens and Arnold Sommerfeld. Wilkens was a professor of astronomy and director of the Munich Observatory, which was part of the University. From 1928 to 1933, he was an assistant at the Munich Observatory. From 1934 to 1935, he was an assistant to Heinrich Vogt at the University of Heidelberg. Thüring completed his Habilitation there in 1935, whereupon he became an Observator at the Munich Observatory. In 1937, Thüring became a lecturer at the University of Munich.
Go to Profile#11566
Henry A. Bumstead
1870 - 1920 (50 years)
Henry Andrews Bumstead was an American physicist who taught at Yale from 1897 to 1920. In 1918 he was scientific attache to the United States embassy in London. In 1920 he was Chairman of the National Research Council.
Go to Profile#11567
Pierre Fatou
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Pierre Joseph Louis Fatou was a French mathematician and astronomer. He is known for major contributions to several branches of analysis. The Fatou lemma and the Fatou set are named after him. Biography
Go to Profile#11568
Edward Fitzpatrick
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Edward Augustus Fitzpatrick was an American college administrator, author, editor, government official, military officer, and conscription expert. From 1929 to 1954, he served as president of Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was known for being one of the country's foremost experts on military draft policy during World War I and World War II.
Go to Profile#11569
Rex Mortimer
1926 - 1979 (53 years)
Rex Alfred Mortimer was an Australian academic and expert on communism. Mortimer attended Melbourne High School and received a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Melbourne in 1947. He became a member of the Communist Party of Australia at the university and remained active until 1969. He completed a doctorate dissertation on the Communist Party of Indonesia at Monash University in 1971 under the guidance of Herbert Feith. Mortimer went on to become a faculty member of the University of Sydney before dying of cancer at Royal North Shore Hospital on New Year's Eve 1979. Peter Singer...
Go to Profile#11570
Wu Youxun
1897 - 1977 (80 years)
Wu Youxun , also known as Y. H. Woo, was a Chinese physicist. His courtesy name was Zhèngzhī . Biography Wu graduated from the Department of Physics of Nanjing Higher Normal School , and was later associated with the Department of Physics at Tsinghua University. He served as president of National Central University and Jiaotong University in Shanghai. When he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago he studied x-ray and electron scattering, and verified the Compton effect which gave Arthur Compton the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Go to Profile#11571
Carlos Varsavsky
1933 - 1983 (50 years)
Carlos M. Varsavsky was an Argentine astrophysicist. Early life Varsavsky was born in Buenos Aires in 1933. After completing secondary studies in the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, he settled in the United States. In the US, Varsavsky graduated in physical engineering, in which he also obtained a master's degree from the University of Colorado. In 1959 he did his doctorate in astronomy at Harvard University. He was the younger brother of Argentinian mathematician and social scientist Oscar Varsavsky.
Go to Profile#11572
Henrietta Hill Swope
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Henrietta Hill Swope was an American astronomer who studied variable stars. In particular, she measured the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid stars, which are bright variable stars whose periods of variability relate directly to their intrinsic luminosities. Their measured periods can therefore be related to their distances and used to measure the size of the Milky Way and distances to other galaxies.
Go to Profile#11573
Aleksandr Mikhailov
1888 - 1983 (95 years)
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Mikhailov was an astronomer who was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He worked at Pulkovo Observatory from 1947 to 1982. He was its director until 1964 and is credited with leading its post-war revival after the fall of Leningrad.
Go to Profile#11574
Leland Cunningham
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Leland Erskin Cunningham was an American astronomer and discoverer of minor planets. In a career spanning 50 years, he became an authority on orbit theory and on precise measurements of the orbits of comets, planets, satellites, and space probes. He was also an early authority on electronic digital computers and assisted in their construction and use in orbit calculations.
Go to Profile#11575
Louis Dunoyer de Segonzac
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Louis Dominique Joseph Armand Dunoyer de Segonzac was a French physicist. He was awarded the Valz Prize by the French Academy of Sciences in 1929 for research on spirit levels and on photoelectric cells as applied to astronomy.
Go to Profile#11576
Bohuslav Hostinský
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Bohuslav Hostinský was a Czechoslovak mathematician and theoretical physicist. Family His father Otakar Hostinský was a musicologist and professor of aesthetics at Charles University. Bohuslav Hostinský was the eldest of four siblings.
Go to Profile#11577
Mildred Allen
1894 - 1990 (96 years)
Mildred Allen was an American physicist. Biography Early life and education Mildred Allen was born in Sharon, Massachusetts to MIT professor C. Frank Allen and Caroline Hadley Allen. She had one younger sister, Margaret Allen Anderson.
Go to Profile#11578
Adolfas Jucys
1904 - 1974 (70 years)
Adolfas Pranaitis Jucys was a Lithuanian theoretical physicist and mathematician, and inducted member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in 1953. He graduated from Kaunas University in 1931 and later worked with both creators of the self-consistent field method – Douglas Hartree in Manchester and Vladimir Fock in Leningrad . Adolfas Jucys created the scientific school of theoretical physics in Vilnius, was the head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at Vilnius University . He organized the first Institute of Physics and Mathematics in Lithuania and was its first director , and later...
Go to Profile#11579
Martha Betz Shapley
1890 - 1981 (91 years)
Martha Betz Shapley was an American astronomer known for her research on eclipsing binary stars. Early life Shapley was born on August 3, 1890, in Kansas City, Missouri, one of seven children of school music teacher Carl Betz and his wife. Her family were descendants of German immigrants, and her grandfather once told her that he had seen astronomer Caroline Herschel in the streets of Hanover in Germany. Her mother and two sisters became schoolteachers, and Shapley herself became a schoolteacher at age 15. Three years later, she began her studies at the University of Missouri, where she earn...
Go to Profile#11580
Pyotr Lukirsky
1896 - 1954 (58 years)
Pyotr Ivanovich Lukirsky was a Soviet physicist who specialized in experimental physics in radiation and optics. He was a student of Abram Ioffe and became a fellow of the Physico-Technical Institute. He contributed to industrial developments as well as to crystallography and basic physics.
Go to Profile#11581
Oscar P. Snyder
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Oscar Peter Snyder was a United States Army major general who served in the Army Medical Department as a Chief of the U.S. Army Dental Corps from 1954 to 1956. Biography World War I Oscar Peter Snyder was born to Emil and Anna Snyder on 6 January 1895 near Millersburg, Holmes County, Ohio. He attended the Orrsville public schools graduating in 1912. He entered The Ohio State University College of Dentistry and graduated with the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery in June 1916. He was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Regular Army on 24 October 1916. He first served at Columbus Barracks...
Go to Profile#11582
A. L. Narayan
1887 - 1973 (86 years)
Appadvedula Lakshmi Narayan, better known as A. L. Narayan BA, MA, D.Sc., F.I.P. was an Indian astrophysicist and was the first Indian Director of Kodaikanal Solar Observatory during between 1937 and 1946. He was born in 1887 to Shri Appadvedula Vyasulu and Smt. Mahalakshmi in the Mukkamala village of East Godavari District of Andhra Pradesh. He studied up to matriculation in the higher secondary school at Kothapeta. He developed keen interest in the study of Science and continued his studies in the Government Arts College, Rajahmundry. He passed the B.A. degree and did Postgraduation in Physics from the University of Madras in 1914.
Go to Profile#11583
Antonino Lo Surdo
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Antonino Lo Surdo was an Italian physicist. He was appointed as professor of physics at the Istituto di Fisica in Rome in 1919; upon the death of Orso Mario Corbino in 1937, he became the director. Lo Surdo studied terrestrial physics, including seismology and geophysics; the 1908 Messina earthquake caused the death of his parents and other close relatives, except his brother. He contributed to the foundation of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica under the auspices of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, when its president was Guglielmo Marconi.
Go to Profile#11584
Eugene Gardner
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Milton Eugene Gardner was an American physicist who worked on radar systems at the Radiation Laboratory in Massachusetts. Early life He was born in Santa Cruz, California, but would have been born in China if his father, a missionary under the American Board of Missions, had not returned temporarily to the United States for safety during the Boxer Rebellion.
Go to Profile#11585
Daniel Frost Comstock
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Daniel Frost Comstock was an American physicist and engineer. Biography Comstock attained a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1904. He also studied in Berlin, Zürich, and Basel, where he attained his Ph.D. in 1906. At the University of Cambridge he studied under J. J. Thomson. Beginning in 1904 he was a member of the faculty at MIT in theoretical physics .
Go to Profile#11586
Isaak Kikoin
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Isaak Konstantinovich Kikoin , , was a Soviet physicist of Lithuanian origin and an author of physics textbooks in Russian language who played an important role in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons.
Go to Profile#11587
Harold Loukes
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Harold Loukes was a British academic in India and at the University of Oxford. Loukes was born in Ecclesall, Sheffield, Yorkshire. He was educated at the Central Secondary School in Sheffield before studying English at Jesus College, Oxford. He obtained a first-class degree in 1934 and then spent 10 years teaching at the University of Delhi and at the New School in Darjeeling, where he was headmaster. In 1945, he returned to Britain, teaching for four years before being appointed a lecturer in the Department of Education of the University of Oxford. In 1951, he was promoted to Reader in Education; he spent a total of 30 years in the department.
Go to Profile#11588
Carlotta Maury
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Carlotta Joaquina Maury was a geologist, stratigrapher, paleontologist, and was one of the first women to work as a professional scientist in the oil and gas industry. She worked as a palaeontologist within an oil company; she was a petroleum geologist at Royal Dutch Shell. Maury focused on Tertiary mollusks. Maury initially taught in universities after attending Cornell University finishing with a PhD in 1902, although she had trouble achieving a full-time position. However, she really wanted to pursue paleontological expeditions. Even though she went on to later be successful, there were still elements of difficulty in her early career, in some ways due to her gender.
Go to Profile#11589
C. E. S. Phillips
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Major Charles Edmund Stanley Phillips OBE FIP FRSE was a 20th-century British physicist and radiologist. He was also a gifted amateur artist. One of the founders of the Institute of Physics in 1920, the Phillips Award is named in his honour.
Go to Profile#11590
Hendrik Lorentz
1853 - 1928 (75 years)
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect. He derived the Lorentz transformation of the special theory of relativity, as well as the Lorentz force, which describes the combined electric and magnetic forces acting on a charged particle in an electromagnetic field. Lorentz was also responsible for the Lorentz oscillator model, a classical model used to describe the anomalous dispersion observed in dielectric materials when the driving frequency of the electric fiel...
Go to Profile#11591
Hugo Stintzing
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
Hugo Stintzing was a German university lecturer in physics at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt. He was involved in early research on the electron scanning microscope, studied radioactive elements and developed a model for the periodic table. He was the Director of the Institute of X-Ray Physics and Technology at Darmstadt from 1936 to 1945. He was removed from his position due to his involvement in the National Socialist German Workers' Party , and was interned in 1946.
Go to Profile#11592
Pieter Oosterhoff
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
Pieter Theodorus Oosterhoff was a Dutch astronomer. He was the co-administrator, along with Jan Oort, of the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. His published papers are primarily in regard to variable stars and photometry. He is most noted for his 1939 observation that there appear to be two populations of globular clusters based on the periodicities of their RR Lyrae variable stars. These two populations would come to be known as Oosterhoff groups after him.
Go to Profile#11593
Eizaburo Nishibori
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Eizaburo Nishibori was a Japanese scientist, alpinist and technologist. He is also known as the captain of the primary Japanese Antarctica wintering party. Nishibori was born in Kyoto in 1903. In May 1928, he graduated from the Faculty of Science, Kyoto Imperial University, and stayed on as a lecturer. In 1936, he received his graduate degree.
Go to Profile#11594
Vladimir Prokofiev
1898 - 1993 (95 years)
Vladimir Konstantinovich Prokofiev USSR scientist, PhD, specialist in Optics and Spectroscopy, USSR State Prize winner. Vladimir Prokofiev graduated Mikhailovsky Artillery School in 1917 and Saint Petersburg State University in 1924. He was a student of Russian academician Dmirtiy Rozhdestvenskiy.
Go to Profile#11595
Jean Mascart
1872 - 1935 (63 years)
Jean Mascart was a French astronomer and mathematician. Career Mascart was on the staff of the Paris observatory. On 17 May 1910, Mascart was at Tenerife to observe Halley's Comet from the southern flank of Pico de Teide.
Go to Profile#11596
Trevor Kincaid
1872 - 1970 (98 years)
Trevor Kincaid was a Canadian-American scientist and professor at the University of Washington who achieved national acclaim for his scientific achievements while an undergraduate student. Kincaid's interests ranged from insect life to marine biology to mollusks, though he once described himself as an "omniologist" . He is best known for introducing the gypsy moth parasite to the United States, for helping establish the Washington state oyster industry, and as the driving force behind the creation of the Friday Harbor Laboratories. Kincaid is responsible for the identification and naming of hundreds of species; at least 47 plant and animal species were, in turn, named after him.
Go to Profile#11597
Grigory Landsberg
1890 - 1957 (67 years)
Grigory Samuilovich Landsberg was a Soviet physicist who worked in the fields of optics and spectroscopy. Together with Leonid Mandelstam he co-discovered inelastic combinational scattering of light, which is known as Raman scattering.
Go to Profile#11598
August Herman Pfund
1879 - 1949 (70 years)
August Herman Pfund was an American physicist, spectroscopist, and inventor. Early life Pfund was born in Madison, Wisconsin and attended Wisconsin public schools until his entry into the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he earned a B.S. degree in physics and studied under Robert W. Wood.
Go to Profile#11599
Carl Otto von Eicken
1873 - 1960 (87 years)
Carl Otto von Eicken was a German otorhinolaryngologist. Biography He studied medicine at the universities of Kiel, Geneva, Munich, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he served as an assistant to surgeon Vincenz Czerny. He received his habilitation for laryngo-rhinology and otology at the University of Freiburg, and in 1911 became a full professor at the University of Giessen, where subsequently, he was named head of the newly constructed ear, nose, and throat clinic. In 1920/21 he served as university rector. In 1922 he succeeded Gustav Killian at the University of Berlin, where he maintained ...
Go to Profile#11600
Maria Pogonowska
1897 - 2009 (112 years)
Maria Pogonowska was a Polish-Israeli scientist of Jewish origin. She was a doctor of physics. Biography Maria Asterblum was born in Warsaw. Her father was Maurycy, a lawyer and her mother Salomea. In 1915, she entered the Warsaw University, newly opened after the Russians left Warsaw, studying physics. She was one of only four women admitted in the first year of studies. In 1924, she became the first doctor promoted by the Department of Physics; her doctoral advisor was Stefan Pieńkowski. She worked as a senior assistant at the Department of Experimental Physics at Warsaw University and has ...
Go to Profile